Portfolio Update – My Investments in 2021 (February)

Welcome to my portfolio update for February 2021!

If you’ve seen my previous monthly update, you’ll know that I changed the format of these in 2021.

I’m a strong believer in diversification, which is why I’m using these updates to talk about how all of my investments performed. Not just P2P lending as I did in the past, but also my ETFs and the rest of my portfolio.

We will of course also go over any important events that happened last month in the peer to peer lending and investment space.

Just please remember that none of what I write is investment advice, just my own opinion based on my personal experience as an investor.

Let me give you a bit of context before we go over each of my investments. This is my my current asset allocation, which I shared last month:

Because of market fluctuations, the actual percentage points can be a bit off on a month by month basis, but still this what I’m aiming for long-term.

Let’s have a look at how my ETFs performed in February.

ETFs

In case you’re new, I like to keep this strategy as simple as possible. My wife and I only buy a single, low-cost exchange traded fund, the Vanguard FTSE All-World (VWCE), at the beginning of every month.

It’s the easiest, most cost-effective way that I know for us to diversify our investment over more than 3.500 companies from all over the world and to profit from the growth of the world’s stock markets long-term.

• The brokers we use
• Finding the best ETFs in 2021

February was another volatile month in the stock market. Here’s how our ETF is doing so far in 2021:

• +2,47% in February
• +3,13% since the beginning of the year

Ever since March of last year, it may almost feel as though stocks only go up in price, month after month. I can promise you, that’s not the case. There will be months or even years when we see negative returns as well.

Of course, I will be sharing those as well. I’m hoping that all of this will help you get used to the volatility we’re dealing with and to treat ETFs as a long-term investment, not something to hop in and out of.

Let’s move on to my second largest investment after ETFs, P2P lending.

P2P Lending

Here is my P2P platform allocation right now:

I’m aiming to reduce Crowdestor to the same size as Lendermarket, Viainvest, Iuvo Group and Robocash over the coming months. Other than that I’m pretty happy with my allocation right now.

Let’s have a look at how each platform performed and discuss noteworthy events.

Mintos

• Income (Feb. 2021): 64,66€
• IRR: 12,44%
• Invested since: 27.09.2018

I withdrew a total of 1.068€ in February, as I want to have around 7.500€ invested on Mintos. Sadly, my funds in recovery haven’t moved much, hopefully that will change over the course of the year.

A few lending companies left Mintos in February. Here’s what happened and my thoughts:

1. Finko Georgia simply left because they decided to stop lending activities in Georgia
2. The same happened with BB Finance in Finland
3. And with Aasa in Sweden
4. The ITF Group left for unknown reasons, but they weren’t a major player anyway
5. Stik Credit probably left because they’re trying to finance loans on their own lending platform, Afranga. Their rating wasn’t the best to begin with, so I don’t think it’s a huge loss for Mintos investors.
6. Lastly, we have Capitalia, who left because they are now focusing on lending to larger companies and they’re planning to change funding source to achieve that. I didn’t have any of their loans in my portfolio, so I don’t consider them as a major loss either.

Crowdestor

• Income (Feb. 2021): 43,86€
• IRR: 9,58%
• Invested since: 03.04.2019

23 out of 43 business loans are late right now and things are moving along quite slowly.

I would like to reduce this account to 2.500€ over time. Crowdestor still has a lot of room for improvement when it comes to enforcing timely payments by its borrowers and recovering funds.

Lendermarket

• Income (Feb. 2021): 36,04€
• IRR: 14,19%
• Invested since: 21.11.2019

Lendermarket is still my best performing platform at the moment.

I recently added a second auto invest. Now 30% of my investments are going into short-term loans from Spain and Poland with the highest interest rates (up to 16,6%/year), while the remaining 70% are being invested into loans with longer durations from Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Estonia at 14% interest/year.

• Get 1% cashback on your investments on Lendermarket after 60 days via my link.

Viainvest

• Income (Feb. 2021): 22,57€
• IRR: 12,25%
• Invested since: 11.10.2019

While the auto invest on Viainvest generally works well, it is sometimes a bit slow to pick up new loans when they’re available.

If you want your money fully invested more quickly, an easy way that I’ve found is via their smartphone app. New loans are added several times per day during working hours. If you check every once in a while, it only takes a few seconds to buy them manually.

• Get a 10€ signup bonus on Viainvest via my link.

Iuvo Group

• Income (Feb. 2021): 17,36€
• IRR: 13,31%
• Invested since: 05.10.2018

Iuvo Group recently improved the conditions of its refer-a-friend program for new investors. You can see the details here in case you’re interested in the platform.

Robocash

• Income (Feb. 2021): 13,47€
• IRR: 9,10%
• Invested since: 19.01.2021

I deposited an additional 1.500€ to Robocash on the 12th of February, increasing my investment to 2.500€.

I also published my Robocash review, which you can find here in case you missed it.

• Use this link or the referral code advE to get 1% cashback on all your Robocash investments after 30 days.

Bondora Go & Grow

• Income (Feb. 2021): 6,16€
• IRR (incl. withdrawals): 6,67%
• Invested since: 01.09.2018

EstateGuru

• Income (Feb. 2021): 3,71€
• IRR: 6,70%
• Invested since: 12.10.2020

EvoEstate

• Invested since: 03.02.2020
• IRR: 0,46%

I was supposed to receive my first full repayment for one of my loans on EvoEstate in the end of February, but that was delayed until the end of March.

Sadly, this is one of the downsides when it comes to real-estate loans. You have an additional layer of security due to a hard asset backing the loan, but delays are quite frequent.

My Income From P2P Lending in February

Platform	Income	IRR	Invested	Value
Mintos	64,66€	12,44%	5.961€	7.998€
Crowdestor	43,86€	9,58%	6.052€	6.915€
Lendermarket	36,04€	14,19%	2.013€	2.530€
Viainvest	22,57€	12,25%	2.177€	2.525€
Iuvo Group	17,36€	13,31%	1.562€	2.521€
Robocash	13,47€	9,10%	2.500€	2.516€
Bondora Go&Grow	6,16€	6,67%	900€	1.233€
EvoEstate	0€	0,46%	730€	733€
EstateGuru	3,71€	6,70%	500€	512€
Mintos I&A	0,15€	10,07%	64€	170€
Total	207,98€		22.459€	27.653€

I earned a total of 207,98€ in interest from P2P lending in February, which is a 0,76% return on investment for the month.

Speculative Investments

I try to keep these at around 10% of my portfolio. For me, this part is made up of cryptocurrencies, consisting of around 70% Bitcoin and 30% Ethereum.

• How to get started with Bitcoin

February was pretty crazy for this space, after Tesla announced that they purchased $1,5 billion worth of Bitcoin in January.

That was 8% of their cash reserves which they decided to invest in Bitcoin instead of holding USD.

The funny thing is, looking at Bitcoin’s price, they already made far more money from that decision than I think they ever made selling cars.

It will be interesting to see if other popular companies do the same and decide to put a small amount of their balance sheets in bitcoin. That would certainly be a catalyst to drive the price up higher.

That being said, let’s see how Bitcoin and the second largest cryptocurrency Ethereum performed so far in 2021:

Bitcoin:

• +41% in February
• +65% since the start of the year

Ethereum:

• +16% in February
• +109% since the start of the year

So yes, this part of my portfolio is not doing too badly at the moment.

Now, before you YOLO your life savings into cryptocurrencies, please don’t forget that this is an extremely risky asset class, where prices can go down just as quickly. So never invest more money than you can afford to lose.

Alright, that’s it for my investments in February! All in all, I definitely can’t complain about how things are moving right now.

However, one thing I’m sure of is that it won’t be this smooth of a ride until the end of the year, so stay tuned to see everything that happens until then.

I’m sure we’ll have months were I’m glad to have cashflow coming from P2P lending, while maybe the rest of my portfolio is in the red. Either way, this year should be interesting.

How are you feeling about your own investments since the start of the year?

You might enjoy these posts as well:

• CapTrader: Interactive Brokers Without Monthly Fees
• Robocash Review: How Did I Miss This One?
• Finding The Best ETFs in 2021 (European Investor)
• Viainvest Review – 15 Months Later (2021)
• How To Buy ETFs – My Investment Strategy
• PeerBerry Review – Worth It In 2021? (My Personal Opinion)

My Investments in 2021 (February) – The Video